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Autonomous NonDestructive Inspector (ANDI)
This project is no longer active.
Head: Mel Siegel
Mailing address:
Carnegie Mellon University
Robotics Institute
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Associated center: CIMDS
Associated lab/group: Intelligent Sensor, Measurement, and Control Lab
For more information, see this project's homepage.
ANDI's design was dictated by the FAA's state of mind and by the state of NDI technology around 1990, when the project was defined and begun. The state of mind at the time, still dominated by the Aloha incident of 1988, was that large scale eddy current "fishing expeditions" are a desirable way to head off future Alohas, and that large scale instrumented inspection could be made palatable to commercial airline operators if there were an economically acceptable automated device to deploy the sensors.
The state of technology for eddy current sensors at the time was mainly manually manipulated point probes and complex impedance plane displays of their signals. These circumstances led to a design that maneuvers most gracefully along long fore-aft lines of rivets, maintaining precision alignment with them so that an eddy current pencil probe scanned parallel to the line of motion would follow the desired scanning path with little or no need for additional closed loop path control.
Note: This list may not be comprehensive. It contains only those publications in the RI publications database. Entries are listed in reverse chronological order.